A/B Testing

Testing for Higher Direct Mail Response Rates

There’s a strategy to getting direct mail campaigns right, and with print there’s no room for error. Enter A/B testing. The fail safe way to test direct mail, it pits one campaign approach with another (or several) to show you the easiest way to get the most responses. You might have two distinct offers or new creative you need to try out; run A/B testing and find out which is the most effective.

It’s easy and it’s low-risk to run a direct mail split test, whether the proportions are even or a small sample of your target audience. By testing small or significant changes we can prove what works better and then improve your “control pack”. This is the tried-and-tested method, which can be tweaked to suit updated offers or attitudes from your customers, or replaced completely depending on your findings.

Think about the things to which your customers might respond better; these can be copy changes such as headlines, colours, images, the offer itself or the source of the data. Each plays its importance in eliciting an emotional response from your target audience. You can test all of these with a split test and the results will give you a true representation of your sample so you can enact changes to your creative with confidence.

And now with digital it’s even easier to predict your response rate. Email offers a low-cost alternative to testing your campaigns before deploying Dmail. With our commercial partner, Red Hot Penny, you can try out one or several options of your creative on your database and nail it before going to print. Their sophisticated technology allows for in-depth analysis of the recipients’ behaviour when they receive your email, and this information can be fed back into your database for even more accurate predictions of who is most likely to convert.

Direct mail is one of the most powerful sales-conversion tools available to marketeers, and rather than shooting in the dark, refine your offer. It’s our differences that make us unique, and not one of your direct mail prospects is the same as the next. And while they might share similar interests or behaviours, there’s an offer specific to their needs they cannot refuse. It’s your job to find out which it is and target them with direct mail. A/B testing gets you there faster.